Red Means Run

by Brad Smith

  “What about the second call?”

  “It came at twelve fourteen. He went in and answered the phone and like a minute later he walks out and says I can go. They just picked Cain up.”

  “Who called to tell him?”

  “He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Never occurred to me, you know? I just assumed it was you guys.”

  “So you left?”

  “The guy you’re working for tells you to go, you go.”

  “Did you see any vehicles on the road on your way out?”

  “Not a one. I remember thinking how nice and quiet it was out there in the country. Be nice to live out there.”

  Claire stood up. “I’ll probably want to talk to you again. Can I get a copy of your report?”

  “I don’t think that’s a problem,” Derek said. “Hey, I feel like shit about this. I was supposed to protect the guy.”

  “You did your job.”

  “It doesn’t feel like it. Not when you get this kind of news.”

  When Claire got back to the station it was midafternoon. She’d grabbed a sandwich and a coffee on her way and now sat at her desk, eating while she checked her messages and e-mails. There had been no reported sightings of Virgil Cain, or the Jeep.

  She called the phone company and asked for Comstock’s phone records, incoming and outgoing. They said she would have them in the morning.

  She leaned back and looked at the map on the wall as she sipped her coffee. Whether or not Cain had been at the Com-stock house wreaking havoc, he would have been on the road since daylight, at the latest. Eight, nine hours. Maybe more. He could be holed up in Boston. Or New York City. Shit, eight hours, he could be halfway to Florida.

  Claire was pretty sure he wasn’t in any of those places, though. Claire was pretty sure he was heading north.

  Joe Brady came in late in the afternoon, striding through the doors like a general arriving at the scene of a battle. His shirt was stained with sweat and his tie was in his pocket. He carried his suit jacket under his arm. He saw Claire at her desk and walked over.

  “What have we got?” he demanded.

  “What have we got?” she asked. “We’ve got a major league cluster fuck. Who did you have watching his farm?”

  “It wasn’t a priority. He was on the other side of the river.”

  “Was on the other side of the river.”

  She could tell Joe was not impressed by her tone. Generals didn’t get spoken to that way. He glanced around, to see who was within earshot. “I knew he was a flight risk. Right from the start, I knew it.”

  He was like a dog, begging for approval. “You were right about that, Joe,” Claire told him.

  “And how do we know he even went back to the farm?” he asked.

  “He took the Jeep, Joe. For fuck’s sake.”

  “How do we know that for sure?” he asked. “He said something the day we picked him up about some punks casing the place, after the vehicle. There was a woman there, he told her to hide the car in the barn. Maybe the punks stole it.”

  “If they did, they took his passport and Visa card.”

  “You saying that’s not possible?”

  “I’m saying it’s not likely. I don’t see two punks breaking into a house wrapped with police tape.”

  Joe walked to his desk and draped his jacket over the chair. He sat down and after a moment turned to Claire.

  “All I’m saying is that nobody around the Comstock place saw a Jeep.” He paused for effect. “But the woman next door heard gunshots.”

  “When?” Claire asked.

  “She couldn’t put a time on it. Late, though.”

  “I talked to a neighbor who heard gunshots too,” Claire said.

  “You did?” Joe perked up.

  “He heard them last night,” Claire said. “And he heard them yesterday afternoon. And the day before that. And the week before that. In fact, he couldn’t say for sure when the last day was that he didn’t hear gunshots. Comstock was a gun nut.”

  Joe got up and said he was going for a coffee. When he came back he went to his desk and drank it in silence. Sulking now.

  Visa called half an hour later. Cain had used the card at a gas station in Saranac Lake at eight o’clock that morning. Thirty-four dollars’ worth of gas and a sandwich to go. There had been no other purchases on the card since.

  “Headed for the border,” Joe said when Claire told him.

  “Like I said.”

  “He’s not exactly trying to hide it,” Claire said. “Using the card.”

  “I keep telling you he’s not too bright,” Joe said. “And he’s got no cash. We have his wallet, remember?”

  But he does have cash, Claire thought. Why wouldn’t he use it instead of the card? She was deciding whether to burden Joe with the information about the five hundred when the phone rang.

  It was the police upstate. They had just found the Jeep, parked in a grove of trees on the Mohawk Reserve on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, across from the Ontario town of Cornwall. The officer reported that the keys were in the ignition, the tank half-full. The vehicle was less than a mile from the river.

  “Well, he’s in Canada now,” Joe said. “Just like I said.”

  Claire was getting tired of hearing about how right Joe was, albeit always in hindsight. Funny how he was throwing a perfect game and yet their side was getting pounded. But something else was bothering her. It was how Cain was running. He could have paid cash for the gasoline. And he could have hidden the Jeep in the deep woods anywhere along the river. He was acting precisely the way he’d acted the day before when he had crossed the Hudson and then doubled back. He wanted them to know where he was, right up until he didn’t want them to know.

  “No way he could have used his passport to cross,” she said.

  “I put out the alarm yesterday morning. So if he’s in Canada, how did he get across?”

  “My guess is he would’ve stole another boat,” Joe said.

  “Crossed at night.”

  “He hasn’t been there at night. He bought gas in Saranac Lake this morning.”

  “I say he’s in Canada,” Joe insisted. “It’s time to get the Mounties involved.”

  Claire stretched and stood up. “Let’s do that. But check with state police up there to see if anybody’s reported a stolen boat.”

  “The Mounties will get him,” Joe said. “He’s one of theirs.”

  “Yeah,” Claire said. “They probably have some special insight on how a Canadian thinks.” She started for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home. Then I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

  “Gosh. You going on a date, Claire?”

  “I don’t date,” she said, and she left.

  FIFTEEN

  Claire had a date with Peter Vandervilt. It was a second date; the first one was exactly a week ago. That night he had picked her up at home and taken her to a very good restaurant in Rhine-beck, across the river. They had shared a whole chicken stuffed with truffles and wild leeks. Peter was a Realtor who apparently made a lot of money, and he was one of those guys who liked to spend money, but to spend it—well, properly—as he phrased it. He had a Lexus, and a place in Saratoga, and a nice home in Kingston. There was an ex-wife and a couple of kids in the mix somewhere, but Claire wasn’t quite certain where. She didn’t ask about them.

  The first date had gone all right, but there had been nothing particularly earthshaking about it. Not that Claire was looking for—or believed in—earthshaking anyway. She liked the food and the wine and being treated nicely. Peter talked a lot, about a lot of different things. He knew everything about cars, and finance, and a bunch of other stuff, like fly-fishing in Alaska. Claire knew nothing of any of those things but enjoyed his enthusiasm when he talked about them. He was very much alive, in a way that most fifty-year-olds she knew were not.

  Peter was tall, at least six two, with very good hair and a nice body. He worked out, of
course, and was into some martial arts discipline Claire had never heard of. When he dropped her off, he kissed her on the cheek and said he would call her. She’d had a nice time but, getting out of the car, really didn’t feel one way or the other about seeing him again.

  Then, when he didn’t call after a few days, she began to wonder why. A couple days more, and she wanted him to call. She suspected that she wanted him to call just because he hadn’t and that pissed her off. She had been single now for a year, and before that she had not been single for almost twenty years. Apparently she didn’t know how the game was played anymore.

  So when he called, it made her happy.

  He was driving back from New York so she said she would meet him at the restaurant, a Japanese place downtown. Things went very much the way they had on the first date, although at some point it occurred to her that Peter was a guy who needed to be constantly enthralled by something. Tonight that thing was his new BlackBerry, which he’d bought that afternoon. Apparently he was one of the first hundred people in the world to own this new model, although Claire had to wonder if that ego-stroking assurance could in any way be verified.

  “My guy says this thing will do everything except remove your appendix,” Peter said.

  By the time dessert arrived, Claire was focusing on the fact that Peter had not, over the course of roughly a date and a half, asked her a single question about herself. Not about her job, or her family, or anything.

  He hadn’t even asked where she was from.

  She was still thinking about it, and wondering at what point she might become the thing that enthralled him, when she heard herself tell him that she’d had a long day attempting to track down a man who had escaped from custody, and that she thought she should head home. Peter didn’t ask about the escapee but did suggest she could use a back rub, an art in which he apparently excelled. Claire begged off, citing fatigue.

  She attempted to pay for dinner but he wouldn’t hear of it. He actually seemed angry that she even made the suggestion. He paid, mentioning that he always tipped twenty percent, and then walked her to her car. This time he attempted to kiss her on the mouth. She turned her head at the last second and felt his thin lips brush hers lightly. He said he would call her.

  When she got home, she wasn’t in the least bit tired. She poured herself a glass of red wine and had a long bath, drinking the wine in the tub as she thought about what she had to do the following day. First off, she needed to go see Buddy Townes. After that she wasn’t sure, but it might just depend on what Buddy had to say. She was hoping he knew something that the police didn’t. Which wouldn’t have to be much, at this point.

  When she climbed into bed, it was just past eleven. She was trying to read Virginia Woolf again but it wasn’t going well. Claire suspected that the difficulty had more to do with herself than with Ms. Woolf. She’d had no problem during high school. Woolf provided angst and soul-searching, and for Claire, a typically insecure teenager in a new school, in a new town, those things were just what the doctor ordered. It wasn’t until she was older that she realized virtually everybody went through a period in their lives when they tried to decide just where they fit in to the grand scheme of things. Some people never did figure it out.

  She fell asleep with To the Lighthouse on the pillow beside her. When the phone woke her, she knocked the book from the bed, blindly reaching for the receiver in the dark. She glanced at the clock; it was eight minutes after midnight.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Are you alone?”

  It was a stranger’s voice. Or, at least, it wasn’t a voice she could recall at once, although there was something vaguely familiar there, in the tone more than anything.

  “Who is this?”

  “Tell me if you’re alone. I need to talk to you.”

  The voice was deep, and bordering on laconic. Almost too laid-back, given the hour and the odd request. And then Claire sat up straight, realizing who it was. She looked over at the call display on the phone cradle. Call blocked. She took a moment to reply, and when she did she attempted to match his nonchalant tone.

  “Mr. Cain,” she said. “I am alone. I was just sitting here, waiting for your call.”

  “A lot of fumbling with the receiver, for somebody expecting a call.”

  “I was excited to hear from you.”

  “You were sleeping.”

  “Actually, I was reading in bed. So where are you?”

  “Well, I’m not in jail.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. What do you want to talk about, Virgil? Is it okay if I call you Virgil?”

  “Yup.”

  “You can call me Claire.”

  “Oh boy.”

  There was some noise in the background, what sounded like a chair or a table, scraping across a floor. Faint voices. Claire strained to hear.

  “What was it you wanted to say?” she asked.

  “I saw your fat little buddy Brady on the eleven o’clock news. He was talking about me. He’s kind of suggesting that I killed Alan Comstock last night. Well, not really suggesting. Apparently I’m wanted for the murder of Alan Comstock?”

  “You’re wanted for questioning in the Comstock murder,” Claire said. “But you do recall that you’ve also been charged with the murder of Mickey Dupree. And then there’s the matter of you escaping custody.”

  “Well, one out of three ain’t bad,” Virgil said. “Do you play baseball?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—do you play the game of baseball? One out of three is a .333 average.”

  “I know that. What are you talking about?”

  “I escaped custody, but I didn’t kill either one of those guys.”

  “Oh, one out of three,” Claire said, finally getting the reference. “Well, the only way this is going to turn out well for you, Virgil, is if you surrender yourself and let these matters go before the court. At this point nobody is saying you are guilty of anything. That has to be proven in a court of law.”

  “You telling me that your buddy Brady hasn’t already made up his mind? He’s a little on the judgmental side, isn’t he?”

  Claire wished he would stop referring to Joe Brady as her buddy. She was wondering how to trace the call and then it came to her. She got up and went to the bureau where her badge and her Beretta and her cell phone were. She opened the phone and scrolled down to Marina’s cell number, trying to remember her schedule. She had said something about working the midnight shift.

  “What’s with that guy anyway?” Virgil asked. “Don’t you guys have some sort of intelligence tests you have to take before you become a cop?”

  “I don’t know that you’re in any position to be questioning anyone’s intelligence,” Claire said. “All you’ve been up to.” She kept her tone light, trying to joke with him, needing to keep him talking. She typed the message on her phone.

  u there? I’m on home phone need a trace 845-445-5567

  “Where are you anyway? Montreal? Toronto maybe?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Claire smiled. “You’re not lost, are you?”

  “What was it that Davy Crockett said? ‘I’ve never been lost in my life, but I was confused once for three days.’”

  “I have a feeling you’re not even a little confused,” Claire said.

  “But what do you intend to accomplish out there on the run?”

  “What do I intend to accomplish? That’s why we’re having this little talk. Now anybody who can turn on a TV knows that I’m a mad-dog killer, out there shooting folks and stabbing people with golf clubs and all that. But what if you were to pretend for a few minutes that I didn’t do these things? What would you do then?”

  “Try to find the person that did.” Claire walked to the window and looked out. There was a half moon, a cloudless sky.

  “Let’s stay with that a minute. How would you do that?”
<
br />   “Pardon?”

  “How would you approach this thing?” Virgil asked. “I mean, there’s obviously some common ground between Dupree and Comstock. That is, if the same person killed them both. But maybe it wasn’t the same person. You ever think of that?”

  “I have,” Claire said. “You may not believe it, but I have imagined all kinds of scenarios regarding the two murders. I’ve considered the possibility that maybe you killed Mickey Dupree and then somebody else shot Comstock, knowing you’d be blamed.”

  “Well, you’re half right. The second half.”

  “I have a suggestion for you. Why don’t you come in and take a polygraph?”

  “Well,” Virgil said, then he hesitated. “There’s a part of that plan I don’t like.”

  “Which part?”

  “The coming in part.”

  “The Canadian police are on your trail. They’ll track you down and extradite you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it,” Claire said. “When was the last time you heard of somebody escaping custody and not getting caught?”

  “Ronald Biggs.”

  “Ronald Biggs,” she repeated. “When was that—fifty years ago? Modern police methods are a little more advanced these days. And you’re not in Brazil. So what do you want me to do while I’m waiting for the Mounties to pick you up?”

  “Tell me you’ll try to find out who killed these guys. Do your job.”

  “I always do my job.” Claire waited for him to argue the point and was oddly disappointed when he didn’t. “Why are you calling me if you’re convinced I’m incompetent? Why not call Joe Brady?”

  “Joe Brady is a fucking half-wit.”

  “Now that is judgmental.”

  “Besides, you got better legs.”

  That stopped her cold. Turning from the window, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and saw that she was smiling like an idiot. What the hell was that?

  “You were kinda pissed at Brady,” he continued. “When you were interrogating me. There was something going on there.”

  “No. There wasn’t.”

  “Yeah. There was.”